


in its true light

by QueenOfSkaro



Series: complemented in strength [1]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Good Theo, Like Theo and Stiles were baby boyfriends before Theo moved, M/M, OOC, Out of Character, Puppy Love, Well maybe not exactly good, Young Love, but definitely better, that would make it probably
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-03
Updated: 2018-10-03
Packaged: 2019-07-24 18:35:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,377
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16180832
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/QueenOfSkaro/pseuds/QueenOfSkaro
Summary: Years of torture left Theo in numb obedience, carrying out the dread doctors wishes as they saw fit. Then he was woken.





	in its true light

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: I don't own anything, I only borrow for a little playdate.
> 
> It's my first time writing teen wolf and I am aware that my Theo is way out of character. Please give him a chance though.
> 
> Lots of love, I hope you have as much fun reading it as I had writing it.

He didn’t see him as a real person anymore. He knew, logically, that there was once a time where he held his hand, stroked his cheek – never more, they were too young to want more. He was too young and by far too stupid to appreciate what he’d been given – a chance for goodness, for love, for a kindred spirit. By now this person, boy, whoever and wherever he was, was an image in his head, an illusion to stop him from spiralling too deep into the black nothingness that crept through him at all times. 

By now, he was his lifeline, the anchor to his fleeting sanity.

Theo hasn’t consciously entertained the thought of another life for years. The chance for more than what was his – would have, could have been his, his own, his everything with every fibre of his being – left with his heart, deeply ingrained in the muscle the doctors dried up to be pulverized the moment they cut it out of him. Still the dreams of this moment haunted him – not nightmares, he wasn’t scared anymore, they stole that ability from him like they stole everything else that made him himself. Instead of himself he was now an aberration, a freak of nature – a chimera, they called him. Like he should be proud of it, like it was an achievement.

But he stood by enough surgeries afterward to know that it was exactly that – an achievement. He was still alive, but none of the others managed that. He sometimes wondered if that meant he was already rotten to the core beforehand. But than he remembered a fiery grin and sparkling eyes that had mischief ingrained in them. Mischief. Mischief. He knew that should mean something – everything – but it didn’t. 

He remembered his sister – Tara, she was called. It struck him that it was her fault he wasn’t feeling anything anymore – she never cared for him, or their parents. The only person she ever loved was herself and even then, she was critical, full of malice and hurtful words. He remembered blood on her arms when she came out of the bathroom late at night, remembered the sting on his cheek after she hit him. He hated her, always had. Now her heart kept him alive, her heart and whatever else the doctors transplanted. He remembered the punishments following his many tries to rip her heart out, too. He was too precious for that, they told him right before pumping his fragile mind full of hallucinogens. He wanted to suffer, they said, so they’d allow it. He would see where mischief like that led him.

It was a privilege to call him that, Theo knew. He didn’t know why it was, or who he called it, or what exactly the nickname was. But sometimes when he remembered, when the doctors or another victim in another school in another state said or did something – a poor copy of clever words, a fiery grin, sparkling eyes. There was a mind so brilliant it came forth like fireworks, lighting everything in its path, making it brilliant and beautiful too. There was a heart full to bursting with every emotion known to men, to everyone but Theo. He lost himself there, forgot his thoughts and pains and deeds. He felt at home, felt safe and happy and so good – but after a precious, treasured second, he saw it for what it was – nothing. Nothing but a copy of what was once everything.

Sometimes he dreamed – he liked to think those were his memories, because everything he dreamed concerning the doctors and the surgeries and the pain – all of that happened. Maybe the nice things, the soft things, the dreams about a boy with moles on his skin and bright doe eyes were real too.

Those dreams hurt when they ended. They left him empty, like that one time the surgeon took out his intestines to look for – he never said what he looked for, maybe he did it just because he was curious. Theo was fixed to the table, but wide awake and numb with terror. He tried fleeing as soon as they patched him back up, but of course they found him. They always did.  
He tried to remember his dreams, but they always slid through his fingers like the fog they were to him – nothing solid, only speculations of a life long lost. What he was allowed to keep was the impression of a warm grip on his hand, real enough for him to close his eyes and pretend he wasn’t alone.

He was sent on another assignment, another pointless task for him in whatever big plan the doctors had – they had to have a big plan, but he wasn’t invested enough to care. He wasn’t even sure he cared about surviving to see the end of it. He was only a puppet, as it was, and he stopped caring a long time ago. Caring led to punishments. Not caring was the only viable option he had, separating himself from what they turned him into – until it wasn’t an option anymore. Until he fought against one of the doctor’s chimeras, to show off, to save Scott McCall, some true alpha he was supposed to know from before – until his veins exploded in a thrum of recognition as he met the gaze of familiar wide, speculative brown eyes. No grin, nothing to indicate happiness, only eyes growing wider, raw bitten lips forming an ‘O’ of – what? Shock? Surprise? Theo was normally very good at reading expressions, had to learn it to survive and help along with his tasks. But the boy – man in front of him was a blank slate for him. Theo could see his expression alright, could pinpoint it vaguely towards a plausible interpretation, but all the background noise in his head – information read from faces, scents, sounds, shoved into his head by the doctors to help them along their plans – was white noise, deafened to the point of non-existent. 

His sisters heart stopped pumping cold slick and river water through his veins, an impression he could never quite shake of even after bleeding as profusely as he had. It felt different than it ever had before, like it was more than the cold, empty organ belonging to another, long dead person. It felt vaguely like his own again, like warmth, like home, like long forgotten love – innocent, felt by a boy long dead and forgotten and buried deep beneath his skin.

“Theo?” Mischief asked, surprise colouring a voice far deeper than he heard in his dreams, but lighting fireworks over his nerves nevertheless. He still knew him. After dying and fighting and being experimented on countless times, with a chest filled with another’s heart and blood not only on his hands but in every pore of this scrambled body – Mischief still recognized him when Theo couldn’t manage that most times on his own. 

That right there was everything and nothing compressed into a heart wrenching decision, the first one he allowed himself since stopping to try to kill himself, the first one he wanted to take a risk for again. As if woken from a deep slumber, from years of numb sociopathy, to being stranded in a plan by the doctors leading to more, ever more deaths. But Mischief was so very different, he was pure and would always be everything good Theo clung to in every dark moment he endured, would keep his back straight through every terror he had to go through, with only the mere thought of his hand in his. Mischief was his strength when his own failed, was his will to pull through from sheer stubbornness alone he wasn’t able to remember but could feel something of an echo of. That was what Mischief had been to him for the past years – an echo. An echo of everything worth fighting for, dying for, living for. 

But that exactly was the problem – everything about Mischief was good, from the joyful uncertainty in his gaze to the most divine scent Theo had ever smelled – like a starlit night sky filled with fireworks, like an overgrown meadow in spring, like a picknick blanket held over their heads laughing as the rain came down. Memories burst before his eyes with every breath he took, scenes he forgot through endless torture and terror and chemicals pumped through his bloodstream. Like what movies promised you before you die – your life before your eyes, but it was only the good things he saw so Theo knew this wasn’t about death, but about everything else. 

It was too much, way too much to compensate with a body over a half not his own – he took a step back, his fight-or-flight reflex spinning uncontrollably towards flight while emotions long buried resurfaced, stole his breath, made him dizzy. They were cloying up his airway, making breathing impossible. They crawled through his veins like bugs, making a nest in his sisters heart. They buzzed like flies in his head, escaping tear shaped through his eyes. 

Distancing himself from the situation meant distancing himself from Mischief and he couldn’t, wouldn’t allow that again, so he stayed put and endured the onslaught of every buried feeling, years of forgotten life and years of life best hidden. There were questions in brown eyes, joy faded leaving only the uncertainty of a situation made unbearably awkward by Theo because he couldn’t get a word past the sorrow in his throat, couldn’t form a proper sentence around the love and loss on his tongue. He felt like clawing his throat out, waiting until it was regrown to speak, but he wasn’t far enough gone to think that would go down well. Even if Mischief run around with an alpha werewolf didn’t mean he had to be used to Theo’s degree of bloody.

“Theo? Wow, man, long time no see. Good thing you came around just now, thanks by the way. What are you doing here? Not prying or anything, just curious.” White noise let way to another voice, foreign but soaked in relief and gratitude, breaking the blessed nothingness to let the noisy scents and sounds back inside his already too full head. He had to get a grip. Concentrating on distant sounds – seven cars, five dogs yapping, two almost silent, an endless stream of different television channels, a man yelling at his wife, two couples having sex – he let himself calm down by the multitude of complete irrelevant information. 

The McCall kid was smiling at him, but Theo only graced him with a short look before disregarding him as unimportant. He knew the doctors had different plans with himself as the villain, killing and maiming for whatever end game they planned, but in the light of Mischiefs eyes none of that mattered. At last, at last he got his voice to work in his favour, shoving down the last remnants of panic he felt. He would deal with it later, or never, but definitely not now. The first word with his mind again almost intact, with himself being almost himself, almost real, was of course the name of the one waking him, “Mischief.”

Doe eyes widened first a fraction, then blew black almost fully, as Mischiefs cheeks coloured rosy, a smile slowly blossoming on increasingly inviting lips. And as he saw this smile, this careful and fragile thing of a smile, he was sure to doom them all to death. The doctors wouldn’t like this, wouldn’t like him out of control – they would surely kill him, the first time without reviving him afterwards, and would kill the others too. But that thought, that certainty, only strengthened his resolve. He wouldn’t give up without a fight and fighting was exactly what he was bread for, what they made him for, what he was trained to endure like a dog. 

He would have to trick them, to play them into their own demise. They wouldn’t suspect a thing until it was too late, hopefully. He was always very obedient when it came to his tasks, they wouldn’t have a reason to suspect otherwise now all of a sudden. Maybe he would need help by the genius in front of him, but that would be a last resort – Mischief would be safer if he didn’t know anything. Theo would keep him safe, he swore – he couldn’t find him now only to lose him a few weeks down the line again because the doctors got wind of it. And as long as he didn’t need to tell him about the doctors, maybe he wouldn’t have to tell him about himself either? With all the mistakes he made, all the lifes he had taken, was there any chance at all that Mischief would let him back into his life if he ever knew the truth? Suddenly Theo was terrified, frightened as he hadn’t been in years. 

And when – if, if, if – he had to tell him about the doctors, about his own role in their games – would Mischief forgive a lie? Would he forgive however many lies it took to keep him as safe as he could? If he was still any like the boy Theo once knew in and out, the answer was no. Mischief hated nothing more than lies – being lied to, not lying himself. He could get out of any trouble with a cheeky grin and a quickmouthed lie. Decisions, decisions. Theo wouldn’t have thought that the choice to stand against the doctors, to swear to himself to see their end before they could harm Mischief, was the easy one made. 

Breathing hurt his squeezed-up throat, but he forced the air down before he got too lightheaded. He would have to get used to taking risks, now that he wasn’t cocooned in blissful numbness.  
“Okay, listen. I will say things you won’t like, and things you won’t be able to look at me anymore for. But first – first I’ve got to do this.” And with that heads-up he took two fast steps forward, bent down and, taking Mischiefs face into his bloodstained hands, kissed the small smile from raw bitten lips, committing every second to his fractured memory. This, he prayed, he wouldn’t forget again.


End file.
